You Are the Product
John Lanchester reviews three books on social media, the war for attention, and Silicon Valley giants. His conclusion? “I am scared of Facebook”.
Welcome to the Dark Net
A poacher turned gamekeeper hacker acts as a guide to the clandestine world of the dark net, a home for all sorts of illegal trade.
The Hills Have I.P.s
A issue with the internet’s mechanism for identifying device locations led to millions of devices being incorrectly located in an American couple’s front garden. A funny glitch surely? Perhaps, until the FBI show up.
The story of the internet, as told by Know Your Meme
Tales from the front line of meme documentation. As the Editor of Know Your Meme puts it, the internet is “kind of the anti-Bible. You learn everything terrible about human beings.”
Palantir Knows Everything About You
An investigation into Peter Thiel’s data mining company reveals the extent of the surveillance done by government and corporate clients using their technology.
The complete history of the IBM PC, part one: The deal of the century
A detailed look at the birth and early childhood of the personal computer. http://www.bit.ly/arstechnica-ibm
Is Amazon getting too big?
A searching piece about Amazon and monopoly, published in a newspaper owned by Amazon’s CEO. If you have the time, it’s also worth dipping into the elegantly wrought 28,000 word ‘note’ in The Yale Law Journal that inspired the piece.
Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
Though it is currently the 7th most visited site in the world (and 4th in the US), it’s easy to underestimate the sheer scale of Reddit, the self-styled “front page of the internet”. That scale, and its anarchic traits, have made it the front line in figuring out what is acceptable online behaviour. This insightful and often darkly funny piece meets the people trying to draw the lines.